Monday, October 18, 2010

Flight to Ireland, Dvořák errors

Today I was offered a reasonably-priced, tiny but beautiful one-bedroom apartment to myself, downtown Reykjavík! I'll probably be moving into it very soon. I also booked a flight to Ireland for Christmas, which set me back a pretty penny but will likely be amazing and beautiful and totally worth it. I thought about paying the same price to go home for Christmas but the family's visiting me a couple weeks later anyway, and I didn't want to get culture shock from being back in America and having to go back to Iceland shortly after.
I also finally met with the head of composition at the Academy of the Arts today, who offered me a potential master class lecture in the spring as well as a performance of an electronic music piece on his winter music festival. I'm riding high on good news!

But then I look at the Dvořák Mass we're singing in choir and notice the typesetting errors, and I get a little sad, my rollercoaster has peaked. I know it's a free score online and all, but do you have to pay the price of bad typesetting just to get some public domain music for a choir? Come on. My own compositions don't look perfectly typeset by any stretch of the imagination, but my Sax Octet or piece for folk trio and crotales is not in the classical canon. (Yet. Maybe then it will look really good on paper.)
This example below is forgivable. You forgot to drag the slur up, no bigs.

This one's a little weird, though. There's a ghost tie going nowhere, the notes don't seem spaced correctly within the measure, the top tie isn't high enough, and the bottom slur going through the half note just bugs me.


Bigger, meatier, maestoso-er:


This one, all the dynamics are under the staff with the text, instead of dynamics above the voices and lyrics below. You also get hairpins stabbing the dynamic markings, and a crescendo that leans upward. Reach for the sky, forte!


But the worst offender is below.

How can you possibly sing these syllables when they're set like this? I practically have to rewrite my part. The choir has had to ask questions about missing syllables, which I can understand if there's a mistake or two but this is just a little silly. Writing it as 'con-sub-stan-ti-a-lem', you know exactly what shapes your mouth should make on each note. I'm still working on my pronunciation of the syllables 'nsu', 'bsta', and 'nti'. I'll get it eventually.

1 comment:

Maria said...

you are too funny! the weird syllables were the first thing I noticed about that as well.